[BrianGragg]

Personally the algorithm works just fine for me. If you interact with what you find is trash / comment / like it will show you more of that content. If you don't want to see it dont' watch it or comment on it. You'll stop seeing it and the items you WANT to see you need to interact with and you will continue to get more of that. If you watch / comment on suicide videos thats exactly what you will get in your feed.

[owisd]

Why are they pushing suicide videos to find out which kids are interested in them in the first place?

[Jochim]

They aren't pushing suicide videos specifically. Like most feed driven social media platforms, a video gets some engagement and it appears in the feeds of some users as a result. If it gets flagged or reported they take it down.

TikTok does actively take down content that violates their guidelines. Children are much more likely to come across nudity or porn on Twitter/Instagram.

[owisd]

It's clearly doing some categorisation to curate individual recommendations rather than simply showing the same trending videos to everyone.

[Jochim]

Of course. I let "some users" do a bit too much work in my previous comment.

The point was that they're not doing anything that the other platforms aren't doing.

They seem to do a fair bit to identify content that breaks their guidelines. To the point that users often make up alternative terms for sensitive topics e.g. Nazis become Yahtzees/N@zi and suicide becomes unalive. The belief is that TikTok flags videos with these terms and may remove them outright or downrank them in the recommendation algorithm.

There's a lot more outright pornography on Twitter and Instagram than TikTok.